Notice the giant Download button on the right. That’s really an ad for who-knows-what. To download ClamWin, you want the much-smaller download menu item on the left.

Caveat emptor.

And it’s very cool. Your calendar magically sync’s with the web, available wherever you go.

What’s not to like?

Two decades ago, we touted the LAN. Sit down at any computer in the enterprise, log on and do your work. Super-cool.

Then we rely on the LAN, and when it’s down, lots of expensive people are sitting around.

Now when “the cloud” is down we get the same thing. And, yes, the cloud does go down.

As mysterious and cantankerous as the LAN could be, the cloud is more so. More out of one’s control. Makes me nervous. Am I being curmudgeonly or prudent?

And though it’s cool that the apps are free, how much leverage do we have over Google to keep it all humming, or fix it fast when it breaks?

If you’re a developer, consider screen height a limited, precious resource. Conserve it. Trade width for height. Kill height cruft. (Can I coin that?)

Button bars: traditionally horizontal at the top of the app. Can you make it vertical, to the left or right?

Even the traditional menu bar (“File Edit View … Tools Window Help”) crowds you down by its height.

Case study: Amazon’s Instant Video in Internet Explorer. IE adds menu items and multiple button bars at the top. Then amazon’s web-site adds its headers across the top. The video winds up a tiny fraction of its potential size, squeezed by all the height cruft. Not to blame Amazon: there’s a “full screen” button, and F11 in IE takes away a bunch of stuff (if you know about it).

The lesson: when every layer adds its own, it compounds.

Software developers take heed.

As a user, there’s lots you can do to conserve height.

Did you know you can put the Windows task bar to the left or right? I put mine to the left, as narrow as possible. You lose a little of the icons’ descriptions, but mousing over gives them back. It flushes out some bugs, too: some programs start in the upper left corner, winding up under the task bar. (To move the task bar, put the mouse on the middle top edge and drag it to the middle left.)

Most software today lets you move menu bars, and the best ones let you dock them to the left or right, making them vertical. Very nice, though they can truncate text menus. Your word processor has several: don’t live with them crowding you. It’s worth retraining your eye to work with them vertically. (Convince your complaining co-workers, too.)

For working with source code, height is particularly valuable. Source-code flows down, and seeing more at once is better. I have a two-monitor set-up on my desk-top, and my cheap, last-generation NVidia video card lets me turn one monitor sideways. A $40 monitor stand and you’re in business. This has been an indispensable productivity boost for me. Don’t work with all horizontal monitors.

When looking at code, can you bump your font-size down one? You’ll see a lot more.

Update. I promise I’m not making this up: one day after this pontification a client passes along a request to do exactly this: rearrange things to conserve screen height in a program I wrote a couple years ago. File this under eerily prescient or physician heal thyself?

It’s Google Street View inside the prominent museums of the world, with high-resolution images of each work.

What a great concept! Hat’s off to them.

I’ve been through Amsterdam three times (stop-overs to other destinations), and never got to see either the Rijksmuseum or the Van Gogh Museum. I look forward to exploring them here.

I hope and expect that this will increase museum traffic.

The mind boggles at the mess this could potentially be if they’re dealing with a breakage of something that fundamental. My heart goes out to them. I hope they have (or can create) the right view of their system to make it all good. I haven’t seen any announcement to that effect.

Software engineers hard to find
Shortage of trained IT talent challenges Chicago companies

Good to know in these troubled times.

And to keep in mind:

“One good developer can do the work of three or four guys,”

And this…

… finding qualified job candidates is “the bane of my existence.”

Wally gets it (in his own Wally way).

The art of this job is binding the rare moments of inspiration to knowledge and machines.

That’s what I mean when I say, “…good ideas…”.

But we can’t afford the moments to be rare.

First, it’s very well-written and has an excellent tone. I hope never to fold a business, but if I had to, I hope I’d bow out as gracefully as they are.

Hats off to them for knowing when to quit, and letting us all know with this much advance notice.

We’re not in another dot-com bubble. Without a convincing plan to turn a profit, investors won’t bite. Two million users (astonishingly!) seems not to be good enough.

Technically, it’s an excellent product. I’ve used it for some time and it works great. Shouldn’t that be enough?

Entrepreneurial authors like Guy Kawasaki say that a product based on something you’d want yourself is a better way to go than an anticipated audience. And that’s exactly what they had.

Your competition isn’t far behind. If they’d started a “freemium” service early on, would they have built a loyal customer base that despite the free competition?

I don’t mean this harshly: the CEO couldn’t conjure magic. The engineers couldn’t find a working business model, but neither could he. I suppose I’m biased toward engineers, and CEOs exist because the engineers too often can’t do it without them. But it’s not a slam dunk for anyone.

I’d love to hear their experiences after some time has passed. Would it have been a viable business for a leaner team? What if they’d geared toward a smaller long-term revenue stream from the start?

Of course, if this farewell is really XMarks’ maneuver to get their customers’ attention (and it turns the business around), the CEO has earned his keep right there.

Fare thee well XMarks. You have an excellent product.

Update, 12/18/2010: Xmarks gets acquired by LastPass. Ok, so was the good-bye post a ploy? (And if it was, did I call it or what?!) Either way, I’m glad they’re still around, for everyone’s sake.

When you push bits all day, it’s hard to imagine these kinds of real-world interactions.

Or when a multi-threaded, calculation-intensive program kicks the PC’s fan up a couple notches, you realize: hey, I did that.

Embedded developers joke about the HACF machine instruction: Halt and Catch Fire. You don’t expect that on your desktop machine, but don’t rule it out completely.

It’s a TV show, but it pretends the TV is a computer. (When Dora asks where something is, you see a mouse go across the screen and click it.)

But we watch it off of the Netflix instant queue on our computer.

So our computer acts like a TV acting like a computer.

And our computer’s monitor is a TV set.

So the TV acts as monitor, for a computer acting as a TV acting as a computer.

How many full circles is that?